Friday, March 3, 2017

Selling Office 365 Azure options

One thing that many IT resellers don’t appreciate is that when you get Office 365 you also get Azure. You don’t get the “full” Azure that allows you to run things like VMs (that requires a paid subscription), but you get a version with a limited subset of features. These included features that typically relate to Azure AD.

So there are a swag of features in Office 365 Azure that most resellers don’t know exist and are also not generating revenue from.

The above spreadsheet provides a framework to help IT resellers create a product offering around some of these features.

The spreadsheet has a number of tabs:

- Summary = summary of generated revenue

- Setup = costing for the initial setup of these advanced Office 365 Azure features

- Maintenance = costs for the ongoing maintenance of these features

- Extend = costs for extending these features beyond the standard provided

So let’s work through an example to give you a better idea of how to use this framework.

Start on the Setup tab. Start in cell C3 which is the fixed costs for Branding an Office 365 tenant. The figure you’d enter in here is you cost to do the branding. Let’s say that it costs about $100 worth of labour. Thus, we enter 100 here.

Cell D3 is the cost per user of enabling this service. Because branding is tenant wide there is no per user set up so there is probably nothing that can be entered here.

Cell E3 is other incidental costs for setting up the service. In the case of branding that may mean things like graphic design, etc. In this example, let’s enter 20.

Cell F3 is where you enter the total number of users in the tenant. For this example enter 15.

The Total column should now calculate to $120 which is the total cost of you enabling this service for the customer. Cell H3 converts that total cost to a per user cost.

Now in cell J3 you enter the margin (as a percentage) you want to add on top of your costs. Here enter 25.

The Total Sell column should now show $150 and cell L3 shows this sell price as a per user cost.

So that’s the product for setting up tenant branding. You can now move to the Maintenance tab and repeat the process to determine a maintenance product for branding. In this case there is probably not a maintenance product you can create for tenant branding since it is kinda a one shot deal. Likewise, there is probably not a product you can create about extending tenant branding beyond what is provided out of the box.

Therefore, let’s move to the second item – SSO portal.

You repeat the same costing and sell process in the Setup tab. There will however this time be a per user set up cost as each user needs their own unique portal. With that line completed on the Setup tab you now have another product.

Moving to the Maintain tab for SSO Portal you can create an ongoing product because updates will be required to the portal, so enter the costs, add some margin and determine the sell price. There’s your next product.

The SSO Portal can be extended with the addition of an Azure AD Premium license to add more features, thus we can again repeat the process for on the Extend tab for the SSO Portal. Part of the costs here will be the costs of an add on license for Azure AD Premium for each user. When complete, there’s another product.

If you now complete the rest of the spreadsheet you should have quite a few products you can now sell to customers individually or bundle up and include elsewhere. Easy eh?

Here’s you challenge. Use this framework and go out to your existing customer base with the products you have created here and sell at least $1,000 of new “products” you didn’t have before you read this post. You should be able to easily accomplish that within a week without too much effort. Start now and let me know how you go and how much more than $1,000 you actually make!